Security sale becoming more of a challenge

Security resellers are finding it more of a challenge to find the right person to sell to in an
organisation as the boundaries between desktop, remote and telephony purchasing blur.

The need for a consultative sale, potentially including numerous conversations with different
contacts at a customer, emerged as one of the themes of the market at an industry roundtable hosted
by MicroScope.

Those responsible for running the channel at vendor level reported back on
changes at customer level, which had a direct impact on both the chances of a sale succeeding as
well as the likelihood of budget being found for a purchase.

"You find that the decision makers fall across three of four different departments in an
enterprise, so a reseller salesperson needs to touch all of those people. Before traditionally you
would have gone to the CTO now you are having to talk to the person who looks after firewalls, the
compliance officers and the people who look after mobile for BYOD and suddenly they all have a
slice of the pie," said Matthew Robinson, sales and marketing director at Kaspersky Lab.

"So tactically it's far more challenging. So the sales people and the resellers are going to be
successful are the ones that will take that holistic view, that the solution transcends more than
just one department," he added.

Others agreed that as a result of the various different departments being involved it was also
getting harder to find single lumps of budget earmarked for security.

"We are used in the past to thinking of a budget meaning a lump of money. But now when you say
budget it might mean a series of business cases that are created by different organisations with
different responsibilities, and different ideas of where the risk lies. It might be the CSO, a
security operations team and so when you see this budget as a lump of money it's not it's very
fluid," said Warren Constable, technical account manager at Qualys .

Because of the pressure on budgets resellers were in turn having to face the changing buying
landscape to ensure they found pockets of revenue.

Terry Greer-King, UK managing director at Check point, said that it was in the interests of
vendors to help resellers have conversations with buyers higher up the chain to make sure that no
one was missing out on potential silos of activity in customers.

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Value-added resellers and service providers interested in reselling Aruba networking hardware and software can learn the benefits of becoming an Aruba Networks partner with this standardized checklist. Compare Aruba's reseller partner program with other vendors' offering similar products.